Music Legacy

Bagtoons began in 1991 as an independent recording label. It was at a time when technology was already playing a rapidly increasing role in music production. By that time I had already incorporated my first personal computer into my creative process. It was an Atari 1040ST. The processor was a Motorola 68030; the same processor used in Macs at the time.

Not long after, the internet would begin playing a major role in the marketing and distribution of music. I was fascinated by the emerging web technologies and Bagtoons began its branch into web design and development. Initially this was done in the interest of the music promotion but eventually other artists and different types of businesses needed to establish their presence on the web. The primary business of Bagtoons soon became web design and development.

There were only a handful of released albums of note and they are available for free on this site.

Around 1992 I began to develop arthritis in my hands and had to give up playing my primary instrument which was the bass. It was this development that led me to rely more heavily on technology in music production. It also wasn’t as though I was devoid of a technical background as I originally began my university studies as an electrical engineer, so the transition was rather natural.

Remastering and Remixing

When CD’s took the lead as the most popular audio format in the late 80’s it was a very interesting period. Vinyl and pre-recorded audio cassettes were previously the more popular formats. Cost aside, the advantage of CD’s was that we got to hear music without any background noise; tape hiss in the case of cassettes and dust and scratches in the case of vinyl. These formats also deteriorated with the amount of play time further reducing their quality.

CD’s however were initially produced from the same original masters as tapes and vinyl. This spawned a whole new age of digital remastering in an effort to take full advantage of the potential quality that CD’s offered. There are still audiophiles who prefer the ‘analog sound’ of vinyl.

The idea of ‘remastering’ for me is to take old recordings, which I often consider as music recorded as late as the mid to late 90’s and reprocess the frequency spectrum and dynamics to create a more modern sounding production. Conventional remasters do this type of processing but to a limited degree. A conventional remaster would use the original master as the source material. My sources vary from old CD’s, mp3’s and audio streams to other remasters themselves. In some cases I have used digital transfers from vinyl as my source material. You get the scratches and pops and other qualities (distortion) that you hear all the time from DJ sampled material from vinyl.